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Bank Regulation and Supervision

Which regulatory policies and supervisory practices make banks more effective in channeling society's savings to the most deserving borrowers? While the International Financial Institutions have stressed the importance of effective regulatory and supervisory institutions for the stability and efficiency of banking systems around the world, until recently no cross-country evidence was available on the relative benefits of different institutional and organizational structures of bank regulation and supervision

Database

In 1999, the first comprehensive cross-country survey was compiled on how banks are regulated and supervised, including requirements and regulatory powers regarding entry, ownership, capital, activities, auditing, organization, liquidity, provisioning, accounting, disclosure and bank exit. Cross-country research using these data have shown the importance of supervisory policies to foster market discipline and have shed doubts on policies that simply strengthen supervisors' ability to intervene in banks' day-to-day business.

The guide lists questions condensed from theWorld Bank Survey of Bank Regulation and Supervision. It shows the shortened form of the questions, combines some related questions, and omits additional questions, which allowed respondents to provide more detailed answers and to attach actual laws and regulations

In Rethinking Bank Regulation: Till Angels Govern, James Barth, Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine present an analytical framework for viewing bank regulation, describe in some detail the 2003 version of the database, use the database to investigate the impact of bank regulation on various dimensions of bank performance, look at what determines the decisions countries make on the orientation of the regulatory environment, and draw policy conclusions.

Availablefrom Cambridge University Press. The CD included with the book includes both the database and the indices used by the authors.

Documents

You can also downloadother related documents. These include content-rich current outputs (updated document versions, miscellaneous documents and web pages).